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.Batman on TV.



Compiled, edited, spindled & mutilated by Bill Laidlaw

This page was erased by person or persons unknown, or possibly by some joker at the old website, and took some time to rebuild. I will backup webpages on my computer from now on. I promise

Episodes of the series can occasionally be seen on TV Land or Nickelodeon's Nick-At-Night starting the last weekend in April, 2002:
9:00 PM Batman 95 "Enter Batgirl, Exit Penguin" Penguin schemes to marry Barbara Gordon in order to become Commissioner Gordon's son-in-law and thereby exempt from the law. But the commissioner's daughter turns out to be a third secret crime-fighter called Batgirl and only Alfred knows her true identity
9:30 PM Batman 97 "The Wail of The Siren" Siren gets Commissioner Gordon under her spell and then goes after Bruce Wayne, whom she directs by using her hypnotizing vocals, to give her the Wayne family fortune and jump from a skyscraper. Her hope is that Batman will come to Bruce's rescue, so she can enslave him and discover his secret identity
10:00 PM Batman 108 "Catwoman's Dressed to Kill" Catwoman (Eartha Kitt) disrupts a luncheon honoring Gotham's ten best-dressed women by detonating a Hair-Raising Bomb to frazzle the hairdos of all the ladies there. She tries to steal some Gernreich dresses from the fashion show. She eludes Batman and Robin, capturing Batgirl and imprisoning her in the Cat-lair. She phones Batman later to tell him she's set a power pattern-cutting machine to cut Batgirl into a pattern of herself. He, meanwhile, has deduced Catwoman's next goal will be the priceless Golden Fleece, and his frightful problem now is to choose between rescuing Batgirl, at one side of town, or saving the Golden Fleece, at exactly the opposite side.
10:30 PM Batman 101 "Louie, The Lilac" Louie plots to control the minds of Gotham's flower children. Robin is subdued after sniffing Louie's alba vulgaria poison lilac and Batman is vanquished by a vase. The Dynamic Duo is then left in Louie's Hot House to be devoured by a giant Brazilian man-eating lilac. Milton Berle didn't go for comedy in this episode, instead basing the deadly Louie on a certain gangster of the 1920s.

Monday to Friday, Batman can be seen in 2-episode hours on TV Land @ 4am starting with four Riddler episodes:
The Riddler uses a trumped-up lawsuit to try to unmask Batman in court. Batman is forced to break the law himself, and Robin ends up in the master-fiend's evil clutches. Watch for the latest dance craze: the Batusi!
In part 2, The Riddler tries to lure Batman into a trap using Robin as the bait.
Disguised as Charlie Chaplin, Riddler strikes the box office of a silent film showing. Following his riddles leads Batman and Robin to the scene of his next robbery, a bakery payroll, where the Riddler and his gang are disguised as a location film shoot. After taking out the dynamic duo outside they're third target, the Baker Street branch of the public library, the Riddler and his film crew crash a party. Spiking the punch with a Temper Tonic turns the whole party into a brawl, leaves Batman confused, and allows the gang to escape with boy wonder as their hostage.
Part 2 - With Robin as the Riddler's captive, Batman rushes to the lumber yard after deciphering yet another riddle. Seeing the Boy Wonder sawed in half makes Batman break down with grief until he realizes that the real victim was only a wooden dummy. The Riddler escapes, but Batman captures a hostage of his own, the Riddler's moll, Pauline. After taking her back to the Batcave, The Caped Crusader gets her to confess a riddle that leads him to the Chessman Building. Batman narrowly saves Robin before solving a skywritten riddle that leads them to the house of a silent film producer. Batman and Robin stop the Riddler from stealing a priceless silent film collection and send him to jail.

Monday, 6/17: Batman 85 - A Piece Of The Action Part 1 - Black Beauty stops at the Pick Chip Stamps factory, and Green Hornet and Kato (Bruce Lee) stealthily enter and are confronted by the foreman, Col. Gumm and his assistants, Reprint, Block and Cancelled, who want the trespassers out. Although he has the upper hand, Green Hornet leaves. The following morning, Gumm, faces the owner, Pinky Pinkston. Bruce Wayne then gets a call from Gordon, telling him Green Hornet is in town. As Batman and Robin race to Gordon's office, Britt Reid is calling Pinky, who invites him to lunch with her and Bruce. Batman tells Gordon he suspects Pinky's factory is turning out fake stamps. That night, Green Hornet and Kato enter the factory and are taken by Gumm and his men while Batman and Robin enter through a window. The Caped Crusaders attempt to rescue the Green Hornet but, stuck to a glue table, they are forced to watch the Green Hornet and Kato being fed to the Enlarged Perforation and Coiling Machine to become man-sized stamps.
7:30 PM Batman 86 - Batman's Satisfaction Part 2 - As they are unglued, the Caped Crusaders leap to and disconnect the electric plug. Batman loosens the outer casing of the machine until the Hornet can free himself and Kato, but Gumm has kidnapped Pinky. The Hornet and Kato leave to pick up Gumm's trail, but Batman finds Gumm's alphabet soup which he is sure contains a message from Pinky. The message mentions a warehouse and a warning about the Stamps Exhibition. Meanwhile, Gumm is telling Pinky that Bruce Wayne is Green Hornet and that Britt Reid is Batman. After Pinky's poodle chews her free, she tells Gordon and Chief O'Hara Cumin's guesses and they rush to the International Stamps Exhibition. Disguised, Gumm breaks up the affair by grabbing the stamps, and is escaping with his men when the Hornet and Kato, Batman and Robin arrive to flatten the villains

Batman (1966) is currently showing on AMC (American Movie Classics) on Friday, 5/17/02 @ 7:10pm/10:10 EST and 11:20pm/2:20am EST
TNT will show "Batman & Robin" (1997) on Friday @ 9pm, while TBS has past Monstervision movie Conan the Barbarian also @ 9pm
Newer Batman movies & the animated series show on other channels from time to time

Batman was created by Bob Kane in 1939 (Detective Comics), inspired by The Shadow pulp novels and radio series. Though there was never a Batman radio series to compete with The Shadow, the character did guest star occasionally in the 1940s Superman radio series (in some cases, the actor who played Superman was away, so there were Batman-only episodes of the Superman radio series). Stacy Harris, the actor who played Batman on radio, went on to star in "This Is Your FBI" on radio starting in 1945. For more info, check out the Radio page or go to the RadioSpirits.com website, I think it's currently the "Old Time Radio" button at www.Mediabay.com

By 1966 the comic book was in decline and a Batman mid-season replacement tv series (in January) played the character as a campy semi-spoof that was quickly embraced by college students, becoming an overnight sensation. Most of the episodes were an hour long, shown in two 30-minute segments on Wednesday & Thursday nights. Like old movie serials, Batman & Robin were always in some "dire predicament" at the end of part 1. The series ended its first season with both the Wednesday and Thursday episodes in the Top 10 ratings.

In September, a third half-hour was added, on Friday nights: spin-off series The Green Hornet starring a rather stiff Van Williams as the Hornet and a young kid named Bruce Lee as his crime-fighting assistant Kato (Bruce Lee choreographed the fight scenes and tutored Burt Ward in karate). Green Hornet only lasted one year however, so in September the following year (1967) a new character was added to Batman: that of Batgirl. Batgirl had been added to the comic book to cash in on the popularity of Wonder Woman. The series was now a single, self contained 30-minute episode per week until March 1968, and wasn't renewed

Was Batman ahead of it's time? Not really. But there was an episode in which King Tut steals an amber necklace. When they find his abandoned headquarters, they find the remains of the necklace. He has smashed open the bits of ancient amber and brought to life the extinct insects trapped inside...

During the 2+ year run of Batman, it became one of the hottest tv series in Hollywood. Actors that did little or no tv agreed to play villains on Batman. Cliff Robertson even spoofed his Western movies, playing an evil cowboy named Shame (more recently, he played the nasty President in Kurt Russell's "Escape From L.A.")
Some of the other villains in the tv series: 
 The Penguin..............Burgess Meredith
 The Joker................Cesar Romero
 The Riddler..............Frank Gorshin in several eps
                          John Astin in one
 Egghead..................Vincent Price
 King Tut.................Victor Buono
 Catwoman.................Eartha Kitt
                          Julie Newmar
 Mr. Freeze...............George Sanders (actor & former movie director)
 The Mad Hatter...........David Wayne (Ellory Queen's dad in 1970s tv series)
 Bookworm.................Roddy McDowell (star of Planet Of The Apes)
 The Archer...............Art Carney (the Archer would've killed Ralph Kramden)
 Lola Lasagna.............Ethel Merman
 Minerva..................Zsa Zsa Gabor (former "Queen Of Outer Space")
 The Devil................Joan Crawford 
 The Black Widow..........Tallulah Bankhead (of Hitchcock's "Lifeboat")
 Lady Fogg................Joan Collins
 Lord Fogg................Rudy Vallee (who also guested in Night Gallery)
 The Puzzler..............Maurice Evans (the master warlock TV's in Bewitched
 
 
1960s Batman Cast

 
               Batman               Adam West
               Robin                Burt Ward
               Alfred the Butler    Alan Napier
               Aunt Harriet         Madge Blake
               Chief O'Hara         Stafford Repp
               Commissioner Gordon  Neil Hamilton
               Barbara Gordon       Yvonne Craig
               TV themesong         Neal Hefti
By the way, on radio Vincent Price (Egghead) played "The Saint," based on the novel series, while George Sanders (Mr. Freeze) played the Saint in a Hollywood movie series, and Roger Moore of the James Bond movies played the Saint in a tv-series.
Trivia question: was Adam West ever in a spaghetti western? Come back on a future date for the answer. Same bat website, same bat webpage

Batman Movies & Serials

Batman (1943), 15 awful episodes (he wears black long-underwear, grey swim trunks, a viking helmet, and drives a Model-T batmobile) were nevertheless well-received as Plan 9 From Outer Space type camp when an edited feature-length version was re-released in 1965.
Batman & Robin (1949, aka The Return of Batman), 15 more episodes. A hooded villain is The Wizard.
Batman (1966) movie based on the tv series
Several of the Batman tv series villains also appeared in this movie. Eartha Kitt was seen as somewhat controversial for her support of black activists and was replaced as Catwoman in the movie by Lee Meriwether (her only time as Catwoman, she later costarred with Burgess Meredith in the high-tech spy series "S.E.A.R.C.H.), and in the rest of the tv series by Julie Newmar. In the movie, Penguin kidnaps the world's leaders from the U.N. Building in his submarine and uses a device to remove all moisture from their bodies, reducing each to a pile of dry chemicals (an idea later used in a Star Trek episode). Batman, Robin and the others were played by the same actors from TV. The Admiral is played by Reginald Denny.
In 1977, Adam West & Burt Ward reprised their roles in a Saturday morning cartoon series The New Adventure of Batman, which used the newly-perfected Rotoscope process for more fluid animation.
Previous cartoon series were The Batman-Superman Hour (1967-68), which replaced The Superman-Aquaman Hour (1966-67), and Superfriends starting in 1973.

Legends Of The Superheroes (1979 tv-movie in 2 parts).
In part 1, superheroes competed against supervillains in offbeat "Battle of the Network Stars" type games of skill. In part 2, Ed McMahon hosted The Roast, a mild battle of wits.
Characters/actors who took part:
Batman/Adam West
Robin/Burt Ward
Captain Marvel/Garret Craig
Hawkman/Bill Nuckols
The Flash/Rod Haase
Huntress/Barbara Joyce
Retired Man/William Schallert
Solomon Grundy/Mickey Morton
Mordu/Gabe Dell
Black Canary/Danuta
Giganta/A'Leshia Brvard
Dr. Sivana/Howard Morris
Weather Wizard/Jeff Altman
The Riddler/Frank Gorshin
Sinistro/Charlie Callas
In the 1990s, a gritty new animated series was started by the Fox network, reflecting the new Dark Knight Batman comic books, then went to first-run syndication starring mostly unknown actors, and with Mark Hamill as The Joker. Adrienne Barbeau (last seen on the Sci-Fi channel as Swamp Thing's girlfriend) is the voice of Catwoman both in the broadcast animated series and in a continuing online series that changed it's name recently to GothamGirls.com after Stan Lee's website disappeared. The online episodes run 2 to 3 minutes and feature Batgirl fighting with Catwoman and/or Poison Ivy and/or Harley Quinn.

The third Batman hollywood movie didn't do so well, and there is serious talk of releasing a feature-length animated Batman in theaters (previous animated Batman features were seen only on tv or in video).

Batman Beyond (1999)
Adventures of Batman & Robin: The Joker (1994)
Adventures of Batman & Robin: Two-Face (1994)
Adventures of Batman & Robin: The Riddler (1994)
Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993)
Batman Returns (1992)
Batman (1989, also available on DVD)
Batman (1966, also available on DVD)
Batmania: From Comics to Screen
Batman
The Green Hornet (1940)
The Green Hornet Strikes Again (1940)
Bruce Lee and the Green Hornet (1960s)

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1960s Batman episodes, all 3 seasons

Green Hornet episode titles (the spinoff series)

Adam West Videos

Superman Videos and/or DVD

www.Sci-Fans.com

Official 1960s Batman page on the SciFi Channel website (if it's still there)

Doc Savage
What would John Wayne, Kurt Russell, or Xena say to Osama Bin Ladin and his terrorists? Click here and find out

Previous year's episode schedule (2001) on the Sci-Fi Channel (no episodes are scheduled after 9/17/01)

If anyone has seen Harley Quinn, please notify Batgirl, Batman, the Tick-Tock Man, or Harlan Ellison

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